[buscht]

Here's a picture of a professional pendant.

Bottom right is the E Stop.
Bottom left is a button you press if you want to transfer jogging control over to the pendant. It lights up when the pendant has control.
Top left is the axis selector.
Top right is the jog , plus or minus
2nd down from the top are the feed and spindle speed overrides.
The 2nd button up from the bottom is the toolchanger release button, for manual tool changes.

[turmite]

Here's a picture of a professional pendant.

Bottom right is the E Stop.
Bottom left is a button you press if you want to transfer jogging control over to the pendant. It lights up when the pendant has control.
Top left is the axis selector.
Top right is the jog , plus or minus
2nd down from the top are the feed and spindle speed overrides.
The 2nd button up from the bottom is the toolchanger release button, for manual tool changes.

buscht In the second sentence of your above post you mention a transfer button for jogging. Is this normally only done at the pendent or does the operator have to first activate at the control? I have never been around a "real" cnc machine much and have never had the opportunity to run one so this is all new to me.

Personal opinion here but I thing it needs to be activated from the control first before the transfer button becomes active. I can just see someone walking by the machine while it was running a program and have to play with all the pretty buttons.

Mike

[buscht]

Mike, on this particular machine, the main control has to be in "manual" mode for this button to be activated. In "Auto" mode the only things that work on the pendant are the E stop and feed,spindle overrides.

Just like you said, you don't want someone pressing the tool release button when the machine is running.
Trent

[lsfoils]

Okay, Benny,
I'm in, have voted, now, whats the lead time? Great suggestion. Do you need more feed back?

Doug

[ynneb]

Good feed back guys.

Kong, I understand the suggestion about having a bare pendant. The only problem then is how are the users going to mark the buttons. I initailly had thought of nicely printed buttons done in polyester membrane. How about if we had the primary buttons and design done in the polyester membrane, but we had a further 10 or so buttons so that the user could program those themselves to what ever they wanted ?

Those buttons abisar and high seas suggested are good choiices for the primary buttons.

In a day or so I will have the first concept drawing finished. I will need feed back on this drawing to know if it is lacking any features that will be a handycap for uising it on your machine.

Isfoils, the lead time will depend on the quotes I get back form the suppiers once we have settled on a final design. Any feedback you want is good.

[kong]

Yep, it makes good sense. I will have a think a bit more tonight, and hopefully have some decent input, but I gotta go wire up the new oven for "her indoors"

[ynneb]

I have emailed Logitec to see if they would be prepared to sell just the electronics for this controller. The good thing about this is that it is also cordless.


It has heaps of inputs that we could use.

Just a question about MPGs. When you trun the knob, does that just simulate a press of a button, but at a very fast speed? If so, then I guess they could be easily lncorperated into the pendant.

EDIT: Because it also has inbuilt rumble feedback, maybe we could program it to reflect a bad feed rate or a crappy cut. (chair)

EDIT: I still havnt given the Ipac/Cypress chip idea the flick either. It would be the cheapest option since the chip is the main component of most usb input peripherals.The chip is only $2.45 Its just designing the circuit board for it that is beyond my scope. Does this PDF make much sence to any electronics nerd out there?
Would anyone be willing to design a circuit board around this chip ?

[ynneb]

I have changed the web site displayed in the inline frame at the start of this thread.
You can view it here also. http://www.pactecenclosures.com/MSOV/standard.html

I am thinking to go for this one here http://www.pactecenclosures.com/Plas...res/TS-SP.html It has 24 button capability and enough room for 2 MPGs. If we order 100 units it will cost $16.61.

Price breakdown so far per unit.

Case and membrane. $16.61
Cypress chip $ 2.45
Circuit board $ 5.00 ( Guestimate )
USB cable $ 5.00
Sundries $ 10.00

Total $39.06

20% Unforseen expenses Safety net
$8.00

Estimated total cost price $47.00

[kong]

Benny, I have been reading the Mach2 group, and most of the MPGs seem to be made from old mice parts. Using the optics from inside, the wheel works like an encoder giving off a set number of pulses/rev. The keygrabber software uses these pulses to control the movement of an axis, although I cannot remember if it recognises the speed at which you turn the wheel, or just moves the number of pulses received at the set feedrate. I will go look some more.....
Oh, just one more thing, you mention USB interface, but I believe the keygrabber software works better under PS/2, so again, I will go check. Keygrabber was designed specifically for Mach2, and is in constant developement, so it seems daft not to use it.
edit - and if it comes in at anywhere near $47, you can put me down for two

[NEATman]

If the price does come out to $47, put me down for at least one, mabye two.
Looking forward to ordering one.
Keith

[kong]

Ok, forget that last post, I re-read the MPG posts on Mach2 groups, and the most effective method for using an MPG as a mechanical handwheel is to use a second mouse directly connected to the PC. The only acceptable uses for MPGs on the ipac interface are for feedrate override or similar controls since the movement can be jerky.
So I am now wondering if it would be better to forget the MPG altogether, and concentrate on just the membrane-pad, or perhaps have a larger enclosure, onto which we can attatch an independant MPG, e-stop and other "big" buttons.

[ger21]

What about joysticks instead of MPG's? Or are you looking for more precise control?

[kong]

Joysticks would be ok for large movements, but are they any good at setting the tool onto the stock? I have never used one for machine control, so I can only imagine what they would be like

[ynneb]

I guess if the keypad has buttons to adjust the jog rate up and down then you could jog rapidly to postion and then press the "jog at 5% " button for finer jogging.

Or

You could have two sets of jog buttons. One at fast speed and the others at low speed.

I dont suppose it matters if we use a joystick control or just buttons. I think most joysticks are either on or off and there is no incremental settings for a partial movement of the joystick.

Maybe if we leave the MPGs out, but we make the box big enough for the user to fit them at a later date if they want.

EDIT: I have been searching on google for MPGs ( a big mistake, dont just type in MPGs ) I am trying to establish what thier electronic component name would be. Any ideas ? I know they exists because my sound system has them, they are different than potentiometers becasue they react to speed of the turn and not the amount of turn.

[turmite]

Benny one word of warning about a wireless setup. This may well be limited to only a few but I have a very large machine and bought one fo the wireless keyboards and mouse setup's. Worked like a charm as long as your are close to the little receiver. My pc/control is located in my office to try to help with the dust problem and I watch the machine through a large safty glass I installed when I built the shop. I made the mistake one day of taking the keyboard out into the shop to the far end of my machine, about 20ft from the receiver, and was going to do a fine tune setup on one of my stocks. Everything was working fine till I hit the z-jog button and then the keyboard went commandless! Is that a word? Anyway I found out how strong my balsawood/carbon fiber gunstocks are. I contacted Art and he said that sometimes the wireless stuff will read a command and then just not take the next one. On the other hand there oare others on the Mach2 board who says they have never had problems.

Mike

[ger21]

Joysticks would be ok for large movements, but are they any good at setting the tool onto the stock? I have never used one for machine control, so I can only imagine what they would be like

I thought I read on the Mach2 group that with joysticks, the farther you move the stick the faster it goes? I could be wrong, but it seems like that is what I remember seeing.

[abasir]

Gerry's right, normal joystick consists of potentiometers, i.e., the resistance vary depending on position of the stick. If the chip has ADC (analog to digital converter), then you could program it to send different commands depending of the potentiometer position. Haven't gone through the Cypress datasheet, so not sure if the chip mentioned has ADC built in.

My guess is that MPG basically consist of optical encoders. Then the chip can do two things:
1) Read the encoder pulses and send the keyboard signal for every pulse; or
2) Calculate the rate of the pulses and send different keyboard signal based on the rate.

For the electronically inclined (that's me) check out the following for cheap optical encoder
http://www.boondog.com/tutorials/mouse/mouseHack.htm

[Greg Fill]

Quote: Maybe the complete circuit board could be designed by one of our budding young electronics nerds on the Zone.

OK I am neither young nor a nerd but I can look into putting something together. Abasir, the Cypress part does not have an ADC but this does not matter. I have a simple pendant that can be redesigned to meet a broader usage. Presently my pendant does not tie into the keyboard. It acts as a pulse generator and outputs Quadrature A / B for TurboCNC and the parallel port. It also acts as a pulse generator using STEP / DIR for direct connection to my stepper controller. I control the step rate using a potentiometer to set the speed but this function can be done other ways. I am not familiar with MACH 2 as I have not played with it yet but from what I am inferring from the posts it can perform jogging functions with keyboard commands. A keyboard interface is easy to do in either USB or Normal serial so there are many options to get some kind of user interface commands feed as keyboard keypresses.

I can envision lots and even consider making my pendant remote using RF (2.4 GHz) but I really need to know what seems reasonable. My short list just consists of a small jog wheel (I use a stepper motor as an encoder) a few buttons to select what axis to move, (X,Y,Z etc) a pulse generator for those who want move an axis at a fixed rate (ie not under computer control) and anything else. I think I need to look at Mach2 to see how it works.

[ynneb]

Greg, sorry to not include you in my invitation, I should have also asked for "crusty old geeks" too. Besides, Bill Gates describes himself as a geek.

If you can include remote possibilities then that would be good too.
Is it line of sight infra red or radio controlled. What sort of distance could we expect?

Mach2 has a program called keygrabber this can allow to user to program any function to any key. Effectively this means all that needs to be designed is a board that is the same as a keyboard interface. Basically it will be the same as the ipac setup as shown at the start of the thread, but with a connector strip for the membrane, instead of the current screw terminal strip. Maybe if there was a little screw terminal inculded so that users could easily add other inputs if they wanted.

Yours Geekfully, Ynneb

[ESjaavik]

If you roll your own RF module it can be made fairly secure using a good error check on the transmission. If the protocol also demands that data be sent continously even if there is no new data, the loss of connection can be detected. Then the receiver should release the Estop relay thus stopping the machine. It will be much better than a keyboard that just detaches from the PC. It also means both the remote and it's receiver must have an MCU.

NB: It will not fill the requirements for Estop even if using this strategy, so you cannot put a button on the remote and call it Estop.